Quotes from Timothy Snyder

The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise, of totality. —

the problem with accepting things that are contradictory as possibly right is that you cannot possibly be thinking yourself when you do it.

The state is for the recognition, endorsement, and protection of rights, which means creating the conditions under which rights can be recognized, endorsed, and protected. The state endures to create a sense of durability. A

defense of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future.

Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy.

Demoralized by their inability to change their station in life, they must accept that the meaning of politics lies not in institutional reform but in daily emotion. They must stop thinking about a better future for themselves, their friends, and their families, and prefer the constant invocation of a proud past. At the top and throughout society, material inequality creates the experiences and the sentiments that can be transformed into a politics of eternity.

States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated.

Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible.

An eternity politician defines foes rather than formulating policies.

But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant.

The answer is thoughtful, plural institutions: an unending labor of differentiated creation. This is a matter of imagination, maturity, and survival. We

Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history.

No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past.

Yet it can be recorded, and it can be understood. Indeed, it must be understood so that its like can be prevented in the future. That must be enough for us and for those who, let us hope, shall follow.

As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere - education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations - Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.

emphasizing cultural differences, making politics about being rather than doing. In the United States, this meant playing to the grievances of whites even though they were a majority whose members held almost all the wealth; in Ukraine it meant exaggerating the difficulties of people who spoke Russian,

Beyond manipulation itself there was no object or subject of politics. There was only the darkness that is consummate when gifted minds such as Schmitt's cloak evil with unreason.

no stereotype can explain why and how, in the six months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a technique to kill Jews in large numbers was developed and some one million Jews were murdered.

The myth of their total responsibility arose during postwar trials in the Federal Republic of Germany as a way to protect the majority of German killers and isolate the killing from German society as such.

The racist and colonial idea that the Holocaust began as an elemental explosion of primitive antisemitism arose as Nazi propaganda and apologetics.

the Nazis first and the Soviets later made efforts to direct responsibility for the killing of the Jews to the countries they both invaded. Certainly

This unprecedented mass murder would have been impossible without a special kind of politics. —

Every man has a name given by the stars given by his neighbors. —ZELDA MISHKOVSKY, 1974

We share Hitler's planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. if we think that we are the victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler. If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler's world.